Book Reviews

Book Review: Drug War Crimes

by Paul Armentano November 1, 2004

Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition by Jeffrey A. Miron (Oakland: The Independent Institute, 2004); 109 pages; $15.95. For the past several decades economists, perhaps more so than any other group of professionals, have been largely united in their criticism of American drug policy. On numerous occasions, prominent economists such as Milton ...

Book Review: How Capitalism Saved America

by George Leef October 1, 2004

How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Crown Forum, 2004); 285 pages; $25.95. Back in my days as a college professor, I used to give my students a quiz on the first day of class. It didn’t count in their grades, and the purpose was simply to find out the extent to which they had absorbed the ...

Book Review: A History of Force

by George Leef June 1, 2004

A History of Force by James L. Payne (Sandpoint, Idaho: Lytton Publishing, 2004); 296 pages; $23.95. Tune in to most news broadcasts and you will probably hear one or more stories dealing with the use of force: armed conflicts in the Middle East; crimes; riots; and more. It often seems that we live in a violence-saturated world. Perhaps so, but political ...

Book Review: Terrorism and Tyranny

by Brigid ONeill March 1, 2004

Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the War of Evil by James Bovard (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); 448 pages; $26.95. If the Constitution could be imagined as a sort of master tailor for the people, fashioning a government that represents their general shape with each electoral try-on, the Bush administration would be bursting at the seams. In an ...

Book Review: Guns, Freedom, and Terrorism

by George Leef February 1, 2004

Guns, Freedom, and Terrorism by Wayne LaPierre (Nashville, Tenn.: WND Books, 2003); 246 pages; $24.99. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Nowhere is that phrase proven to be true more often than in the unending battle between those in our society who believe that the way to reduce violence is to take away from individual persons the ...

Book Review: Dependent on D.C. by Charlotte A. Twight

by George Leef December 1, 2003

Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans by Charlotte Twight (St. Martins Press, 2002); 422 pages; $26.95. I have often thought about how different the United States of today is from the United States my grandfather knew. A century ago, he was a young man embarking on a business career. He and all other ...

Book Review: Government Creep

by Paul Armentano November 1, 2003

Government Creep: What the Government Is Doing That You Don’t Know About by Philip D. Harvey (Port Townsend, Wash.: Loompanics Unlimited, 2003); 159 pages; $12.95. Shopping for a new car? For your “protection,” it will come equipped with airbags. Don’t want airbags in your vehicle? Tough. Not only is it impossible to buy a new ...

Book Review: The Future of Freedom

by George Leef October 1, 2003

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria (W.W. Norton and Co., 2003); 256 pages; $24.95. One of the most annoying things that Americans have to put up with during elections is the rhetoric that sanctifies democracy. We are bombarded with admonitions to vote, with suggestions that there is something shameful in not “participating in our ...

Book Review: Gulag

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2003

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (New York: Doubleday, 2003); 677 pages; $35. Siberia. The word has had a chilling connotation for people around the world for 200 years. Long before Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the tsarist regime had used the vast area that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as ...

Book Review: Defend America First

by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 2003

Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939–1942 by Garet Garrett (Caldwell, Idaho, 2003); 285 pages; $13.95. It has now long been taken for granted by the American citizenry that the president of the United States, in his role as commander in chief, has the authority and power to send American armed forces into harm’s ...

Book Review: To Destroy a City

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2003

To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II by Hermann Knell (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003); 373 pages; $32.50. On the night of July 27, 1943, 728 Allied bombers arrived over the German city of Hamburg at one o’clock in the morning. Ten thousand tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs were dropped on ...

Book Review: The Mind and the Market

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2003

The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought by Jerry Z. Muller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); 487pages; $30. In the 1920s and 1930s, the well-known Italian classical-liberal historian Guglielmo Ferrero attempted to explain the reasons for the social disruptions and civil wars that European society had gone through from the time of the French Revolution in 1789. ...